208w ago - Today PlayStation 3 developer Robo Hobo has announced that a port of the DOSBox emulator for PS3 is currently in development.

To quote: I'm gonna go ahead and announce my intent to port this (along with SDL) to the PS3 cell SDK. There's still lots of clean up to be done, but I've got dosbox running, including games (I've only tested 'Eye of the Beholder'). The SDL port is still missing audio, mouse, and joystick support.

I'm curious if anyone has any ideas that can be used to allow this to be used to its fullest without hooking up a keyboard. Any ideas on how to mount and load the games, or handling kb input in the games would be appreciated.

Hopefully with an SDL port, other apps can be ported too (that SDL version of mame is looking pretty juicy).

I'll post again later with a link to a code repo. For the curious, here are the code repos for SDL and dosbox. It still needs quite a bit of work, so I wouldn't go too far out of my way to build them yet.

To quote: updated it a bit start menu set up , new advanced taskman in tray and all slimmed down to 132mb turned the startup and shutdown sounds off and the shutdown screen to speed things up a bit when running dos sessions, also fixed the dosbox cycles@4000.. so now winspeed reads cpu@56 video@117 disk@172 ... but i am getting some random (ps3) crashing , not much and no harm done.. i packed mainly for the 3.41 users.

i've set up dos based emus to launch from a run.bat so end user can edit and add game to be run, if you have problems try running from explorer, run, run as dos session. so i think i am about done with it most 3d game lag.. but all 2d and simple 3d work. running slow-Pentium fixed @4000 BUT you can bump the cycles up as much as you want, but sound will suffer.

also i still can't get win32s to work on ps3, works fine on pc.. go figure.

Open cubic/midier media player.. two programs linked up to make a very nice package..

Open Cubic Player: a mod player is something I've been wanting to do for ages, it plays: MOD XM S3M AMS MTM DMF ULT 669 NST WOW OKT PTM MDL WAV IT

MIDIer: 8bit MID sounds really nice and at startup auto builds and loads a playlist, artists covered: pendulum, skrillex, daft punk, portishead, moby, massive attack.. in its current state it's all usable and plays all known formats fine.. installs under music.. also i recommend a usb install... it does work with apps installed under music and makes it easy to add your own tunes.

this was just a test .pkg hence why its has a bit of bulk because of the included music but may as well be an early crimbo gift, enjoy

Issues: There are still some performance bottlenecks. In testing cycle values above 10000 provided the most issues. Tweaking some values in dosbox-0.74.conf may help to improve performance.

There are still some usability issues with the on screen keyboard. If a lot of typing is necessary you may consider hooking up a physical one.

Using the fluidsynth midi synth requires a soundfont is sf2 format. Place the file on the PS3 and edit dosbox-0.74.conf to set the value 'midiconfig' to the full path to the file. It's also necessary to change the 'mididevice' option to the value 'synth'.

There is currently no PS3 optimized loader. The DOS commands needed to launch the game need to be type every time you start the app. You can reduce the typing by adding common lines to the dosbox config file's autoexec section.

Using soft mouse and keyboard:

When loading the application PS3 game pad one begins in Mouse Mode. In mouse mode the left stick moves the cursor, Cross sends a left click, and Square sends a right click. Pressing L3 will turn on keyboard mode.

In keyboard mode, the left stick moves the cursor, pressing cross presses the highlighted key. When a key is highlighted and any button is pressed (other than Cross, Square, L3 and R3) that button will be mapped to the key, in mouse mode pressing the button will be the same as pressing the key on the keyboard. Press L3 to return to mouse mode. This is useful, for example, to map the DPad to the keyboards arrow keys.

In mouse mode, press R3 to enter joystick mode. In this mode the game pad acts as an SDL joystick.